Omniplan Progress Tracking Tip

During one of my Omniplan sessions at work, I discovered that the resource leveling was acting a bit funny, where people were not planned to do any work for days. I played around with a fake planning and soon discovered the problem and several solutions to it.

Migrate from Password Gorilla to KeePass

I used to use Password Gorilla to store my passwords, because it can run on both Mac and Windows. Because my password database keeps growing, Password Gorilla is becomming a very slow starter, even on my new solid state disk. A few weeks ago I learned that KeePass is a much more modern application, and is available for both Mac and Windows. Here’s what I did to get all my passwords into KeePass:

Care vs Careless

 

 

It’s frightening to realize how close to the truth Eric Burke is.

Choose: AFP or SMB

I recently upgraded the operating system on my trusty Mac Mini G4 home fileserver from Tiger to Leopard. In addition to the out-of-the-box backup, I no longer have to use SharePoints to manage my network shares. In Leopard, I can just right-click them and arrange the sharing.

In doing so, I decided to switch on both SMB and AFP sharing for all shares. The idea was that my Macs all would use AFP automatically, and all Windows machines would see the SMB mounts. After a few hours, iTunes began acting up on me, because it decided to switch between the SMB and AFP protocol (or so it seemed). Finder also seems to have some trouble listing network shares if the exact same name on the same server is shared with two different protocols.

Because there are people on my network with Windows machines, I decided to switch off the AFP protocol and only go with SMB. I haven’t had problems since.

If you’re sharing drives like I’m doing, go for SMB. It may not be the technically superior solution, but it will “just work”. You can easily switch to AFP when the world is freed of Windows machines.

Programmer Quotes

On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth:

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Rick Osborne

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” - Brian Kernighan

These two quotes are briliantly summing up the usual rant I always use. “if my phone rings at 3 a.m. for a prio 1 production issue, I want to be able to easily read the code. And I’m not going to be awake or cheerful at that time of night.” I guess at that time of night, it’s easy to awaken the violent psychopath in me, and so it better not be “smart” code. CVS blame support anybody?